Category: Story
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The Last Four Months
Part 1: School’s Out Flung into the air suspended above the world emancipated from the forces of reality for this exaggerated moment I see the land below me, firm and eternal, the buzzy habit of humanity, and gravity bides her time— I put one foot in front of the other and with each step the… Read more
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Lviv
After a sleepless, waterless night on a Poland local—the train stopping every nine minutes and the carriage lit up like a midnight wander through a Walmart—and after five hours bracing my feet against the sticky floor of the waiting room in the Polish border town station to keep my seat, which was tilted like a… Read more
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Michael the Judge
There is a park I have passed many times and have always been curious about. Recently, walking to meet Jared (Jared was here), I walked through it and into the little round church therein, which has always sparked my curiosity through the tram window. I was greeted by a man in perhaps his late 50s,… Read more
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Kyiv
The week before classes started, I went to Kyiv (not Kiev, which is the Russian spelling). My friend Jared is a journalist I know from our Minneapolis days, and he’s been living there for the last two years. Twice last year he came to visit Berlin when the frequent air raids started to fray his… Read more
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Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing
FC Union My favorite place in Berlin is the wooded walk to the stadium half an hour before a game begins, the moment the roar of the crowd first reaches me, the trees themselves resounding. Some unnameable thrill swells up in me; I float, elated, on the loudening roar, until slowly the stadium comes into… Read more
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Bambi Legs
In seventh grade, I was cast as the Reverend Mother in my middle school production of The Sound of Music. I was also in Bel Canto Singers, the premiere girls’ choir in Minneapolis. On a grey Sunday afternoon the weekend after the cast list had been posted for The Sound of Music, while my parents… Read more
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Scheiße Scheiße Scheiße (or: trying to live in Berlin)
This is the fourth apartment I have lived in since moving to Berlin in September. It might not be my last before I leave for the summer on June 21st. You will recall that I had two more apartments to my name before I even landed in Berlin. You will recall that in December I… Read more
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Weinmeisterstraße
It’s a chilly-grey Saturday morning in Berlin. Still early—just before 10—and I’m watching the shops open, and the carnation-sellers in their approximate uniforms of white shirts and black pants arrange and rearrange their cute little cart and buckets of flowers, clumsily deciding on the best spot to promote whatever unneeded brand they are here to… Read more
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The Accidental Fulfillment of a Lifelong Dream, and other small miracles
My bedroom windows face the street, my favorite way for my bedroom windows to face. On the lower half of the windows is translucent, prismatic contact paper, which I dislike because it keeps me from staring down at the goings-on below me, but which I appreciate because it distorts the bright lights that would otherwise… Read more
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im Gleichgewicht
Merry Fourth Day of Christmas, vom der staat Nordrhein-Westfalen im Deutschland! I am sitting on the sofa at Inge and Karl Heinz’s house, watching the unhurried turning of the huge windmill’s unbelievable sails as the setting sun sets jet trails a blazing orange above the deep blue silhouettes of the mittelgebirge, themselves hunching shadows behind… Read more